Patch Notes 0.2.0a
Boring patch - just a bunch of fixes. Fixes: Fixes 'Junkyard Deals' perk from causing save issues. Fixes ship navigation going wonky when selling/upgrading a spaceport. Fixes tutorial state messing up when switching between a save file with tutorial enabled and one with tutorial
Boring patch - just a bunch of fixes.
Fixes:
Original post - Fixes 'Junkyard Deals' perk from causing save issues.
- Fixes ship navigation going wonky when selling/upgrading a spaceport.
- Fixes tutorial state messing up when switching between a save file with tutorial enabled and one with tutorial disabled.
- Fixes perk tiles not live updating affordability when viewed.
- Fixes UI pointer getting stuck when a port or supplier gets sold/destroyed.
- Fixes a case where you can accidentally sell a storage facility by holding the trigger button while hovering over the Sell Button and closing the panel.
- Smooths out UI pointer.
- Lowers max render scale to 1.25.
So sales are down and my dreams of having a community feedback engine to drive my development are being diminished.
What do I need to do? Get better at marketing. As a solo developer, I need to be an all-rounded, jack-of-all-trades person, I can't just stick my nose into my keyboard and hope good things will come about of it (but that's what marketing involves nowadays, ah nvm, you get the point).
One of the weak points of the current marketing setup is a lack of a decent trailer. The old one was made in a day, rushed post-release and was treated as more of an afterthought.
So we make a new trailer. Let's get to it then.
The 'Expand' title got removed to streamline the trailer
End of Time by Ugonna Onyekwe
This is where we would decide step-by-step what happens and what is shown in the video. It was at this point that I would start marking different points of the audio track at which transitions would occur.
Now I'll bring up an issue here. As a solo dev with limited human contact, it has been suprisingly difficult to capture decent VR footage. The reason for this being that it doesn't exactly line up with what is displayed on the headset. Not being able to see what is being recorded makes things quite difficult. As a result, I've used the VR footage from the previous trailer.
To really make things different to the old trailer, I decided I would splice up the footage with non-VR, in-game footage. Now won't this be fun.
These clips don't represent normal gameplay - they are there to help create a more cinematic experience.
Another objective of these clips is to show off content in the game - quickly and efficiently.
This doesn't mean that we can just scatter them anywhere, we have to pick points in the existing footage where it makes sense to transition.
I used a combination of Unity's Timeline, Cinemachine, and Recorder to capture this footage.
There's a problem here. I don't know how to color grade. Using DaVinci Resolve, I had no idea what all these dials and graphs did.
Solution? I took a course on 
I would like to add that this color grading journey not only benefits the trailer but will be fed back into the game (via a LUT) in an update coming soonish.
Push the thumbstick forward and a cursor appears. Release the thumbstick and you teleport to the cursor. Feels good.
Push the thumbstick left and bam - you're suddenly facing 90 degrees to the left. Wait, what? Pushing it to the right obviously does the same but in the other direction. Okay.
I completely forgot about this, the Oculus Rift was geared to a more 180 degree experience. It was even in the Oculus setup - place both sensors on either side of your desk and face them forward. Hence, this kind of angle switching feature was a neccessity.
So I took what I learned and mimicked this behaviour in Flat Worlds. Unoriginal? Yes but the idea of this was to give users something they were probably already familiar with.
One thing that couldn't really be repositioned was the controller menu. There just wasn't any space on the controller to put it.
Also, learning from before with movement, menu selection is now done with a simple flick of the thumbstick (in the direction of the menu you want).
And so we have it, Flat Worlds now supports Oculus Touch controllers. The Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive hold a roughly 50/50 split of the majority of the PC VR market - so this was a step in the right direction. WMR? Maybe, but not soon.
Welcome Rift players.
Ships will automatically head towards the nearest Repair Yard available, parking in space if none exists.
Quite a large addition - a set of 6 perks per world (so far 24) have been added to the game. When you buy these you can add them to that world's perk slot - each having a limited number depending on the world's level.
Perks affect a wide variety of things ranging from ship costs to resource consumption/production. They also add a layer of theme to each world.
This allows players to have a pick-n-mix of perks and approach the game in their own way.
A new resource has been added, Crystals. These are a purely luxurious good that are not needed by any cities but can be transported to generate large amounts of profit.
Accompanying the new resource are Crystal Mines, and a new ship Oyster which can be found on Europa.
There are now small and medium versions of spaceports. You can also upgrade a spaceport to a medium one (given it is unlocked).
Additionally, like ships, spaceports now have running costs. This leads to interesting decisions on whether to upgrade a spaceport or build a new one (two small will cost more than one larger).